V. I. Lenin

Speech At The First All-Russia Congress Of

Workers In Education and Socialist Culture

July 31, 1919[1]

Delivered:30 July,1919First Published:PravdaNo. 170, August 5. 1919; Published according to thePravdatextSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 532-539Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

Comrades, it gives me great pleasure to greet your
    Congress in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars.

In the sphere of education we have long had to struggle against
      the same difficulties that Soviet power encounters in all
      spheres of work and in all spheres of organisation. We saw that
      organisations regarded as the only mass organisations were from
      the very outset headed by people who, for a lengthy period, were
      under the influence of bourgeois prejudices. In the first days
      of Soviet power, in October 1917, we even saw how the army
      swamped us in Petrograd with declarations to the effect that it
      did not recognise Soviet power, threatened to go against
      Petrograd and expressed solidarity with bourgeois
      governments. As long ago as that we were sure that these
      declarations came from the top people in these organisations,
      from the army committees of that time, who represented the past
      in the development of the moods, convictions and views of our
      army. The situation has since then repeated itself in all mass
      organisations—in respect of the railway proletariat, and
      again in respect of the post and telegraph employees. We have
      always noted that at first the past maintains its power and
      influence over mass organisations. We were, therefore, riot.at
      all surprised at the lengthy and stubborn struggle that went on
      among the school-teachers, the majority of whom, if not all,
      from the very beginning took a stand hostile to Soviet power. We
      saw how we gradually had to overcome bourgeois prejudices and
      how the school-teachers, who were closely connected with the
      workers and labouring peasantry, had to struggle against the
      former bourgeois system to win for themselves rights and to
      break a road to a genuine rapprochement with the working masses,
      to a genuine understanding of the nature of the socialist
      revolution that was under way. Until now you have had more than
      anybody else to deal with the old prejudices of the bourgeois
      intelligentsia, with their usual methods and arguments, with
      their defence of bourgeois or capitalist society, with their
      struggle, not usually direct but carried on under cover of some
      outwardly pleasant slogans which are advanced to defend
      capitalism in one way or another.

Comrades, you may remember how Marx describes the way the
    worker got to the modern capitalist factory, how he analysed the
    enslavement of the worker in a disciplined, cultured and "free"
    capitalist society, studied the causes of the oppression of labour
    by capital, how he approached the fundamentals of the production
    process, how he described the worker’s entry into a
    capitalist factory where the robbery of surplus-value takes place
    and the foundation of capitalist exploitation is laid down, where
    capitalist society is built, the society that gives riches to the
    few and holds the many in a state of oppression. When Marx reached
    this most significant, most fundamental place in his
    book—the analysis of capitalist exploitation—he
    accompanied his introduction to this analysis with the ironical
    remark that the place he was taking the reader to, the place where
    profit was extracted by the capitalists, was the place where
    liberty, equality and Bentham ruled.[2]By this Marx stressed
    the ideology up-held by the bourgeoisie in capitalist society and
    which they justify because from their point of view, from the
    point of view of the bourgeoisie who had won the fight against the
    feudals, "Liberty, Equality and Bentham" ruled in capitalist
    society which was based on the rule of money, the rule of capital
    and the exploitation of the working people. What they call liberty
    is liberty to make profit, liberty for the few to become rich, the
    liberty of the trade turnover; what they call equality is equality
    between capitalist, and worker; and the rule of Bentham is the
    rule of the petty-bourgeois prejudice about liberty and equality.

If we look around us, if we take a look at those arguments that
      were used in the struggle against us yesterday and which are
      being used today by members of the old teachers’ union and
      which we still meet with among our ideological opponents who
      call themselves socialists (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and
      Mensheviks), those arguments that we meet with in a not very
      conscious form in our day-to-day talks with the peasant masses
      who have not yet understood the significance of
      socialism—if you take a look at and give some thought to
      the ideological meaning of these arguments you will find the
      very same bourgeois motif that Marx stressed in Capital. All
      these people reiterate the catch-phrase that Liberty, Equality
      and Bentham rule in capitalist society. And when objections to
      us are raised from this point of view and it is said that we,
      the Bolsheviks and Soviet power, are contravening freedom and
      equality, we refer those who say so to the elements of political
      economy, to the basic doctrines of Marx. We maintain that the
      freedom you accuse the Bolsheviks of contravening is the freedom
      of capital, the freedom of an owner to sell grain on the open
      market, i.e., the freedom for the few to make profit, for those
      who have grain surpluses. That freedom of the press that the
      Bolsheviks have constantly been accused of having
      violated—what is this freedom of the press in a capitalist
      society? Everybody could see what the press was in our "free"
      Russia. This was seen to a still greater extent by people who
      were familiar with, have been able to observe closely or had had
      dealings with press affairs in the advanced capitalist
      countries. Freedom of the press in capitalist society means
      freedom to trade in publications and in their influence on the
      masses. Freedom of the press means that the press, a powerful
      medium for influencing the masses, is maintained at the expense
      of the capitalists. Such is the freedom of the press that the
      Bolsheviks violated and they are proud of having
      produced—the first press free of the capitalists, that in
      a gigantic country they have for the first time set up a press
      that does not depend on a handful of rich men and
      millionaires—a press that is devoted entirely to the
      struggle against capital, the struggle to which we must
      subordinate everything. Only the factory proletariat that is
      capable of leading the peasant masses that are not
      class-conscious can be the leader, the vanguard, of the working
      people in this struggle.

When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship
    of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is
    proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is
    what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position
    because it is the party that has won, in the course of decades,
    the position of vanguard of the entire factory and industrial
    proletariat. This party had won that position even before the
    revolution of 1905. It is the party that was at the head of the
    workers in 1905 and which since then—even at the time of the
    reaction after 1905 when the working-class movement was
    rehabilitated with such difficulty under the Stolypin
    Duma—merged with the working class and it alone could lead
    that class to a profound, fundamental change in the old society."
    When a united socialist front is proposed to us we say that it is
    the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties that propose it,
    and that they have wavered in favour of the bourgeoisie throughout
    the revolution. We have had a double experience—the Kerensky
    period when the Socialist-Revolutionaries formed a coalition
    government that was helped by the Entente, that is, by the world
    bourgeoisie, the imperialists of France, America and Britain. What
    did that result in? Was there that gradual transition to socialism
    they had promised? No, there was collapse, the absolute rule of
    the imperialists, the rule of the bourgeoisie and the complete
    bankruptcy of all sorts of illusions about class conciliation.

If that experience is not enough, take Siberia. There we saw
    the same thing happen again. In Siberia the government was against
    the Bolsheviks. At the beginning the entire bourgeoisie who had
    fled from Soviet power came to the help of the Czechoslovak
    uprising and the uprising of time Socialist-Revolutionaries and
    Mensheviks. They were helped by the entire bourgeoisie and the
    capitalists of the most powerful countries of Europe and America;
    their aid was not merely ideological but financial and military
    aid as well. And what was the result? What came of this rule that
    was allegedly the rule of the Constituent Assembly, that allegedly
    democratic government of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks?
    It led to the Kolchak gamble. Why did it lead to the collapse that
    we have witnessed? Because here we saw the effect of the basic
    truth, which the so-called socialists from the camp of our
    opponents do not want to understand, that there can be only one of
    two possible powers in capitalist society, either the power of the
    capitalists or the power of the proletariat, no matter whether
    that society is developing, is firmly on its feet, or is
    declining. Every middle-of-the-road power is a dream, and every
    attempt to set up something in between leads only to people, even
    if they are absolutely sincere, shifting to one side or the
    other. Only the power of the proletariat, only the rule of the
    workers can ally to itself the majority of those who work, because
    the peasant masses, although they constitute a mass of working
    people, are nevertheless to a certain extent the owners of their
    small properties, of their own grain. And that is the struggle
    that has unfolded before our eyes, the struggle which shows how
    the proletariat, in the course of lengthy political trials, during
    the changes in governments that we see in various places on the
    outskirts of Russia, is sweeping away everything that serves
    exploitation; it shows how the proletariat is breaking its own
    road and is becoming more and more the genuine, absolute leader of
    the masses of working people in suppressing and eliminating the
    resistance of capital.

Those who say that the Bolsheviks violate freedom and who
    propose the formation of a united socialist front, that is, an
    alliance with those who vacillated, and twice in the history of
    the Russian revolution went over to the side of the
    bourgeoisie—these people are very fond of accusing us of
    resorting to terror. They say that the Bolsheviks have introduced
    a system of terror in administration, and if Russia is to be
    saved, the Bolsheviks must renounce it. This reminds me of a witty
    French bourgeois who, in his bourgeois manner, said with reference
    to the abolition of the death penalty, "Let the murderers be the
    first to abolish the death penalty." I recall this when people
    say, "Let the Bolsheviks renounce the terror." Let the Russian
    capitalists and their allies, America, France and Britain, that
    is, those who first imposed terror on Soviet Russia, let them
    renounce it! They are the imperialists who attacked us and are
    still attacking its with all their military might, which is a
    thousand times greater than ours. Is it not terror for all the
    Entente countries, all the imperialists of Britain, France and
    America, to keep in their capitals servitors of international
    capital—whether their names are Sazonov or
    Maklakov—who have organised tens and hundreds of thousands
    of the dissatisfied, ruined, hum’iliated and indignant
    representatives of capital and the bourgeoisie? You must have
    heard about the plots among the military, you must have read about
    the latest plot in Krasnaya Gorka, which nearly led to the loss of
    Petrograd; what was this but a manifestation of terror on the part
    of the bourgeoisie of the whole world, which will commit any
    violence, crime and atrocity in order to reinstate the exploiters
    in Russia and stamp out the flames of the socialist revolution,
    which is now threatening even their own countries? There is the
    source of terror, that is where the responsibility lies! That is
    why we are sure that those who preach renunciation of terror in
    Russia are nothing but conscious, or unwitting, tools and agents
    of the imperialist terrorists, who are trying to crush Russia with
    their blockades and aid to Denikin and Kolchak. But their cause is
    a hopeless one.

Russia is the country assigned by history the role of
    trail-blazer of the socialist revolution, and that is just why so
    much struggle and suffering has fallen to our lot. The capitalists
    and imperialists of other countries realise that Russia is up in
    arms, and that the future not only of Russian but of international
    capital is being decided in Russia. That is why in all their
    press—in all the bourgeois world press which they have
    bribed with their many millions—they spread the most
    incredible slanders about the Bolsheviks.

They are attacking Russia in the name of the selfsame
    principles of "Liberty, Equality and Bentham". If you come across
    someone in this country who thinks that when he speaks of freedom
    and equality and of their violation by the Bolsheviks, he is
    championing something that is quite independent, the principles of
    democracy in general, ask him to have a look at the capitalist
    press of Europe. What is the screen being used by Denikin and
    Kolchak, what is the screen being used by European capitalists and
    the bourgeoisie in their efforts to crush Russia? Liberty and
    equality—that is all they talk about! When the Americans,
    British and French seized Archangel, when they sent their troops
    to the South, they did so in defence of liberty and equality. That
    is the kind of slogan they use as camouflage, and that is why the
    proletariat of Russia has risen against world capital in this
    fierce struggle. Such is the purpose of these slogans of freedom
    and equality which all agents of the bourgeoisie use to deceive
    the people, and which intellectuals who really side with the
    workers and peasants have to expose.

We see that as the attempts of the Entente imperialists become
    more desperate and vicious they meet with ever greater resistance
    on the part of the proletariat of their own countries. The first
    attempt at an international strike by workers in Britain, France
    and Italy against their governments that was made on July 21 had
    as its slogan, "Hands off Russia, and an honest peace with the
    Republic". This strike failed. Separate strikes broke out in
    Britain, France and Italy. In America and Canada, everything that
    looks like Bolshevism is fiercely persecuted. In the last few
    years, we have gone through two great revolutions. We know how
    hard it was for the vanguard of the Russian working people in 1905
    to rise in the struggle against tsarism. We know that after the
    first bloody lesson of January 9, 1905, the strike, movement
    developed slowly and laboriously until October 1905, when the mass
    strike scored its first success in Russia. We know how hard the
    going was. This was proved by the experience of two revolutions,
    although the situation in Russia was more revolutionary than in
    other countries. We know with what difficulty the forces for the
    struggle against capitalism are mobilised in a series of
    strikes. That is why we are not surprised by the failure of this
    first international strike of July 21. We know that there is much
    greater resistance and opposition to the revolution in the
    European countries than over here. We know that in fixing July 21
    as the date for an international strike, the workers of Britain,
    France and Italy had to overcome incredible difficulties. It was
    an experiment unparalleled in history. It is not surprising that
    it failed. But we also know that the working people of the leading
    and most civilised countries are on our side despite the European
    bourgeoisie’s rabid hatred of us, that they understand our
    cause, and whatever the hardships of the revolution and the trials
    ahead, whatever the atmosphere of lies and deception in the name
    of the "freedom and equality" of capital, equality of the starved
    and the overfed, whatever the atmosphere, we know that our cause
    is the cause of the workers of all countries, and that is why this
    cause will inevitably defeat international capital.

[1]This Congress, held in Moscow from July 28 to August 1, 1919, was
    attended by 230 delegates from 32 gubernias. The Congress heard
    reports on the education programme, the current tasks in the field
    of cultural development, trade union movement, the youth movement
    in Russia and the West, and other questions. The Congress founded
    the All-Russia Trade Union of Workers in Education and Socialist
    Culture; it elected the Central Committee of the Union.

[2]See Karl Marx,Capital,Moscow, 1959, Vol. I, p. 176.